Are you reinstalling Outlook 2011 and want to reuse your existing rules? I had too many mail rules to type in again and thought there would be a better way.

I had performed a clean install of Lion and then reinstalled MS Office 2011. There was no way to export/import the existing rules I had created in the Snow Leopard install of Outlook 2011. I tried copying the rules to the correct directory within Lion with the faint hope that the new install of Outlook would recognize them, but that didn't work.

What did work was this. After copying the existing rules to the new Lion install I ran the Rebuild Database Utility in Outlook. The rules were processed and added to the list.

There were minor errors related to categories but that was because I hadn't created the corresponding categories in the new install. This was much faster and more accurate than retyping all of them.

[crarko adds: If you find yourself in a similar situation, give this a try.]